The Return of The Native

A Lectionary Reflection on Mark 6:1-13

Mark’s Gospel reads like minimalist street-theatre, with abrupt scene changes and plot twists compelling the reader to feel the urgency of the drama. Written primarily to help imperial subjects come to terms with themselves and their colonial world, Mark stands alone in antiquity as a narrative for and about common people. At center stage is Jesus, the itinerant rabbi roaming Galilee healing the sick, raising the dead and feeding the hungry. And, for at least the first five chapters of Mark’s tragedy, he is the popular protagonist known for his revolutionary teaching and civil disobedience. 

This week’s lectionary reading finds Jesus returning home, to the people and place of his past. And due to his growing fame throughout the region, the reader expects him to receive a warm reception. But instead, his neighbors and kin meet him with anger, fear, and contempt. “Is not this the Carpenter, the son of Mary?” Which functions not so much as a question as a mocking conclusion about Jesus’ illegitimacy. In his own town, among his own relatives, Jesus is rejected because he exceeds their meager expectations. There is probably nothing more spiritually suppressive than old time religion in a one-horse town that continues to rely on “how things have always been”.

Why is it that a stranger can see from a distance what a neighbor cannot see close? Things can become too familiar, too absolute. His eyes, hands, voice, and clothes are now plain, predictable, and probably a bit tattered. After all, this is just Mary’s boy, everyone is sure of that. But facts alone don’t lead to faith. When belief is reduced to what is known, certainty becomes the purest of spiritual virtues. Therefore you have a Galilean village, and now an entire religious culture striving for intellectual proof to convince themselves that what they believe is actually true, leaving precious room for the beauty of mystery and the stretching nature of doubt.¹ Maybe there are times when God is just willfully ambiguous...

Jesus’ return home reminds us just how blind we can be to something we think we know so well.

Why was it so hard to see Jesus for who he really is? Why is it so hard to see him now through our best attempts at systematic theology and dogmatic apologetics?

Mark’s drama is the story of the God who is like Jesus. He still confounds, still confuses, and still refuses to fit our preconceived expectations. If anything is certain, it’s that the last two thousand years has proven that those of us who think we know him most may well be the ones who know him least.

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1 Boyd, Greg. TheWorkOfThePeople.com, "The Idolatry of Certainty."